Trick Out Google Apps for Your Domain [Google Apps]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/FqqeciFsi5E/trick-out-google-apps-for-your-domain

You registered a domain name and set up the free Google Apps Standard Edition to get Gmail, GTalk, GCal, and GDocs running behind it. Now, take a look at some advanced settings Google Apps (for your domain) makes available.

What the what? Sometimes we refer to all of Google's regular, free, public products as "Google Apps," but today we're referring to the product formerly known as "Google Apps for Your Domain" as just plain "Google Apps." (Note to Google: Come up with a clearer naming convention.) Give this flavor of Google Apps a domain name you own—like yourfamily.org or example.com—and it puts Google services behind it. If you've got a regular Google Account and you@gmail.com email address, that's cool—you can forward mail for you@yourdomain.com address to and from it. But Google Apps lets you create and manage several users associated with your domain and enable various services for them. Google Apps (for your domain) comes in several flavors: Standard Edition (free for individuals and non-affiliated groups, what we're going to cover here), Premier Edition (for businesses), Non-Profit Edition, Education Edition, and Government Edition.

Nerd Threat Level: Orange

This flavor of Google Apps is only useful to people who own their own domain name (or want to purchase one), and who plan to set up a workgroup b! ehind th at domain. For example, if you're Carol Brady and you register thebradybunch.com domain name, you're going to want to set up several users at that domain. With Google Apps, Carol could create a greg@thebradybunch.com account, a marcia@thebradybunch.com account, all the way down to Cindy, Bobby, Alice, and Tiger. When Marcia gets hitched? Carol can add her spouse to the family domain. When Alice moves onto greener pastures? Carol could shut down or suspend her account.

The two key advantages to using Google Apps this way are: 1.) you get a custom you@yourdomain.com email address that you can take with you to another email provider if Gmail goes away or you want to transfer it. Your regular @gmail.com address is married to Google's service, so you can never use it with another provider. 2.) You get system administrator-level capabilities for setting up your workgroup's IT needs with Google's easy interface. We've already done an overview of what Google Apps can do; if you haven't already, here's how to get it set up with your domain.

If you're not using Google Apps but you're interested, know that it takes a low level set of system administrator skills to get it up and running. You'll need to configure domain settings, such as your email MX record for your domain at your registrar. It depends on who you used (I recommend NameCheap), but most likely your registrar offers a settings panel to configure these things. You'll also have to verify your domain by adding files to the web site, most likely via FTP or another method.

With me? Good. Take a look at some of the gems buried in Google Apps' administrative interface. Access it at google.com/a/yourdomain.com, replacing the "you! rdomain. com" part with, well, your domain name.

Name Your Domain

Google Apps give you the option to give your domain a human-readable label beyond just example.com. For fun and an inflated sense of self-importance, I called mine "Gina Trapani Enterprises," which you'll see in many of the screenshots here. You can set up your domain's name in the Google Apps Dashboard, under Domain Settings>General. You and your domain users will see this name in your apps tab titles, and when you sign into any service.

Map Multiple Domains to Your Account

If you own multiple varieties of your domain name—for instance, multiple top-level domains like example.com, example.org, and example.net—you can map those to a single Google Apps account using domain aliases. To add another domain to your primary domain, from your Google Apps Dashboard> Domains settings> Domain names, click "Add a domain alias" to set another up. (This is located at https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com/DomainSettingsDomains, but replace "yourdomain.com" with your domain.) As you can see from the screenshot, I've got both ginatrapani.org and ginatrapani.com running under Google Apps. This means that if someone emails user@ginatrapani.org or user@ginatrapani.com, those messages all wind up in the same place. This also works for totally different domains, not just different top-level domains (.org, .com, .net, etc).

Manage Domain Users and Groups

If you've got only a few users to create, you can add them to your domain one by one. However, if you've got a large group, Google Apps offers a bulk upload option. To use it, you make a spreadsheet of user's first and last names, use! rname an d password, and upload that to your Google Apps Dashboard. (Visit https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com/Users, but replace "yourdomain.com" with your domain.) You can also create user groups or mailing lists with various flavors of permissions—accessible to the outside world, only reachable from people sending from inside your domain, and with custom roles for each user (member or owner). For example, a softball league might have an "Umpires" group, a "Coaches" group, and a "Players" user group.

Activate Your Services

Once you've set up your domain's users, it's time to activate the services you want to provide. Google Apps Standard comes with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, an iGoogle-like start page, Google Docs, Sites, and Mobile services. (Sadly, there's no Google Reader. Wah!) Activate services from the front page of your GApps Dashboard, and log in and use them at the /a/yourdomain.com URL provided in green below each service.

If you click on the "More Services" link, you'll see more (less popular) services, like Contacts (for accessing your contacts list outside Gmail in Calendar and Docs), Sites (which appears to be a simple intranet application), custom applications hosted on Google App Engine, and even Labs services that include a URL shortener and Google Moderator. I haven't used any other services extensively besides Gmail, GCal, and GDocs in my Apps account, but the more adventurous should dive right in.

Enable Pre-Release Fe! atures

One of the biggest complaints about Google Apps accounts is that they're usually the last to get new and experimental features like Gmail Labs. (Yes, that took an excruciatingly long while.) To speed up the process and get new features in your Google Apps account faster, in your Dashboard under Domain Settings>General, check off "Enable pre-release features."

(While you're there, it can't hurt to check off "Enable SSL" box in the section below that to encrypt your users' sessions automatically for a higher level of security.)

Create a Catch-all Email Address

One of the advantages of having your own domain name is that you have control and access to every single word combination @ yourdomain.com email address that you want. If you create a "catch-all address," you can forward any email that comes to your domain and doesn't match a user to a specific address. This means that if you wanted to use custom email addresses on the fly—like amazon@yourdomain.com when you register for an account at Amazon, or lifehacker@yourdomain.com when you register for an account at Lifehacker, you can do so without having to create custom addresses. Instead, set up your domain's catch-all address to forward to your user account. To set up a catch-all address, in your Google Apps Dashboard, from the Service Settings drop-down choose Email. There you can either reject mail that comes to addresses that don't match a user, or set up a catch-all forwarding address as shown above.

Share Calendars, Contacts, and GDocs Within Your Domain Only

Where Google Apps really shines is in its workgroup-level permissions-handling. In Google Docs as well as Google Calendar, you can choose to share docs and calendars with everyone within your domain only. That means if someone leaves your team and you suspend their account, they automatically lose access to sensitive workgroup data in one shot. You don't have to remove them from every doc and calendar you've ever shared with them. Conversely, when you choose the "Share" option in Docs and Calendar, you have the option to share with everyone in your domain, instead of individuals, as shown here.

Likewise, Google Apps can automatically share a global address book across your domain users. When you add, remove, or update a user from Google Apps, with Contact Sharing enabled, everyone's Google Apps Gmail Contacts list gets automatically updated. (So when someone changes his or her name, that change goes out to everyone's address book in the domain, too.)

Essentially, Google Apps Standard Edition gives you IT director-level administrative control over your workgroup's domain, for free. For more adventures in Google Apps migrations, see Scott Hanselman's thorough writeup on how he switched his family from Outlook and Thunderbird to Google Apps.

This article only scratches the surface of what you can configure Google Apps to do. GApps users, what are your favorite tips and settings? Give 'em up in the comments.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker's foundi! ng edito r, likes her GApps goodness and a portable domain name, too. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

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Voice Mac is an Integrated Google Voice Client [Downloads]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/mTfhHtJXVus/voice-mac-is-an-integrated-google-voice-client

Mac OS X only: While the Google Voice AIR App will do in a pinch for Windows and Linux, Mac users have the option of Voice Mac, a native Voice client that integrates with OS X, including Address Book and Growl support.

Voice Mac has a pretty basic set-up—you have a filterable list of all your contacts (which can either be populated by Google, which includes your contacts and numbers from your sent and received call list that aren't in your contacts), or just your local Address Book on your Mac. You can call any of your contacts, choose which phone to ring, and even bring up a separate window for SMS, like an IM—complete with dock icon badges and Growl notifications.

In addition, you can also bring up a separate window to view your call history, SMS history, and voicemails. It even has it's own reverse lookup function, complete with Google Maps integration, to show you where that unknown number is calling from(and possibly who it is).

Voice Mac is a free download, Mac only. Thanks, Jamie!

Voice Mac

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Add Your Facebook Events to Google Calendar [Calendars]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/qU1NYyB3Qkk/add-your-facebook-events-to-google-calendar

Blogger and techie Sean Bonner offers a dead simple way to keep all of your Facebook events synced up with your Google Calendar so you don't have to manage two completely separate social calendars to keep your days straight.

Even if you don't use Facebook all that often (or maybe especially if you don't), this is a nice option. Once set up, you can check one calendar (your Google Calendar) to see what's going on with your Facebook friends and with whatever else you've hooked into GCal. Getting it set up is simple:

1. In Facebook, go to your EVENTS page.
2. At the top of that page click EXPORT EVENT
3. You'll get a pop up window with a URL, copy it.
4. In Google Cal, on the bottom left you'll see 'Other Calendars' and below that a link to ADD. Click ADD
5. One of the new options you'll be presented with is ADD BY URL, select that
6. Paste the URL from Facebook where it asks for it.
7. Fin

I never check my Facebook events calendar until events pass me by, but I'm always keeping an eye on GCal. After performing this simple setup, you won't need to worry as much about missing an event just because you're not all that big on Facebook.

Facebook Events to Google Calendar [Sean Bonner]

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Mozilla SeaMonkey Updated to 2.0 [Updates]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/XZ5zYK1VPVc/mozilla-seamonkey-updated-to-20

Mozilla's all-in-one browser, email, RSS, and calendar suite SeaMonkey has been updated to 2.0, and it's a pretty big overhaul. The release notes include a lot of new changes, including more similarity to Firefox in the user profiles, add-ons, and UI elements, as well as faster IMAP, Mozilla Lightning calendar plug-in, and more. You can read the full changelog here, or just go download the suite for Windows, Mac, or Linux. [via The Download Blog]

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From the Tips Box: Windows 7 Screencasting, Quicksilver, and Recipes [From The Tips Box]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/mC3B4nX0lWk/

Readers offer their best tips for screencasting in Windows 7, using Quicksilver to launch applications in VMware, and organizing your personal recipes using a blog.

Don't like the gallery layout? Click here to view everything on one page.

About the Tips Box: Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons—maybe they're a bit too niche, maybe we couldn't find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn't fit it in—the tip didn't make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favorites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments or email it to tips at lifehacker.com.

Built-In Screencasting in Windows 7

Mark shows us a nice built-in feature of Windows 7:

I found if you just type "PSR" in the run box, the problem solution recorder pops up. It looks similar to the sound recorder, and when you press record, it captures key actions and saves them as an MHT in a zip file (I assume MHT is Media HyperText Markup Language, because it is all in one file).

Launching Windows Applications in VMware with Quicksilver

Photo by Ben Becker .

Joe shares a convenient tip on how to further Quicksilver's usefulness:

If you add

~/Documents/Virtual Machines/[name of the vm].vmwarevm/Applications

to the Quicksilver catalog you can index! all of the apps in your VMWare virtual machine and use Quicksilver from within the PC Virtual Machine or even launch PC apps from your Mac desktop even when the VM is not powered on (it will start VMware automatically)... Its faster than using the start menu!

Quick Log Off and Hibernate

David tells us how he closes down his computer quickly (without shutting down completely):

I came up with a very simple solution to a problem I've had, and I thought it might be something others would like to do as well. I've been looking for a way to easily log off of my account _and_ hibernate my Vista system in one step (I have work acct and a home acct, and I'd like to be able to hibernate at the end of the work day, but not still be logged on to my work acct...) I wrote (of all things) a two line batch file:

shutdown /l
shutdown /h

I named it LogoffHib.bat and saved it to a convenient place, then made a shortcut to it on my desktop, complete with Ctrl+Alt+End shortcut key, and Boom! I've searched for something like this for ages and never found anything, but I thought someone else in a similar situation might like it too.

Use a Blog to Keep Up with Recipes

Photo by Jennifer Dickert .

Sara-Elizabeth shares her favorite tool for recipe logging:

I know you've had lots of people suggesting ways to keep up with recipes, but I'd like to add my two cents. Borrowing on the idea of saving the recipes in Delicious, I then created a Blogspot account and pos! ted the individual recipes as entries (with photos uploaded to my personal web space and source noted). I can quickly find recipes based on certain criteria and I'm even able to link within recipes to other
recipes needed for the whole project.

Use Wax or Crayons to Keep Wood From Splitting

Photo by Chris Metcalf.

Stephen shares another way to keep wood from splitting:

Surprised that no one has mentioned wax, even a crayon, get it onto the nail and the nail drives about five times easier and much less chance of splitting, to boot.

And absolutely put wax onto a long screw that you're running into hard wood — you'll be amazed at the difference. Soap works also, wax is better IMO.

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